If--and only if--the classes you are teaching do not have final exams, and if--and only if--you have finished grading your papers, then the finest time of year to be a professor is during the spring exam period.
The weather is always gorgeous. The people whom you want to talk to are still around--and are anxious for more interesting interruptions than the grinding work of taking, giving, and grading exams. Yet somehow your day proceeds without too many distracting interruptions: those who would otherwise be looking for you are busily engaged. And there is a falloff in the crowding of the campus as well.
But if you have to take, give, or grade exams, of course, it feels much less pleasant indeed.
Posted by DeLong at May 14, 2004 05:09 PM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postOh, indeed.
Except that I'm all done, grades turned in, school over.
And except that I don't get paid in the summer, this is by far the best time of year.
I keep telling my students that I am more eager for the semester to be over than they are, but they never believe me.....
Posted by: Margaret jc on May 14, 2004 06:08 PMPerhaps he doesn't qualify as world's stupidest dog, but I still wish my dog had not rolled on the carcass of a dead raccoon this evening....
BTW, I read some bloggers entry concerning the government's latest job figures. The writer claimed that tens of thousands of the jobs were merely surmised by the statisticians without any hard evidence. Are the Bushites gaiming the numbers?
Spring is when I do lots and lots of backhoe work. Soft ground. Now we turn to cutting hay in the fields. Blackfly season is beginning. Yucky. Worse than grading papers, I assure you. This is why I encourage swallows to nest under the eaves of the house and the barn.
Posted by: Elaine Supkis on May 14, 2004 07:20 PMBrad DeLong writes:
>
> But if you have to take, give, or grade exams, of course, > it feels much less pleasant indeed.
So what you're saying here is that I should get back to grading the stack of undergraduate essays and stop posting to this blog? Now that's just not fair. :-(
Posted by: Jonathan King on May 14, 2004 07:24 PMHey! Reading your blog was supposed to be my break from grading!
Posted by: Fred on May 14, 2004 10:31 PMWhat is life, but one bright crisp day in the change of seasons---anything before is just preparation and everything after is just useless.
Posted by: CSTAR on May 14, 2004 11:17 PMWorld Civ and Latin grades done and turned in; Roman history term papers still to be read ... back to work.
Posted by: Brian Boru on May 14, 2004 11:17 PMI'm mostly done grading, but as I live in the Washington metro area -- where the weather is in the 80s and the humidity is barely tolerable -- I have to disagree on Spring being the finest time of the year for an academic. I have personally always been partial to Winter break, or the lull after the start of the semester.
And I'd like to know about those job numbers as well :-).
Posted by: Dan Nexon on May 15, 2004 04:04 AMThis time of year is pretty good for a math professor, too, even if you do have final exams to grade. (I'm no longer a math professor, but I used to be. I'm still absent-minded, though.) Because grading final exams is quick and easy, except sometimes in classes involving proofs, and those classes tend to be small, so it evens out. I was generally able to grade each exam I gave while giving the next exam; then a few minutes entering exam grades into Excel, and, voila, semester grades.
Dan Nexon - as a fellow resident of the DC area, I think the weather's fantastic right about now. Remember last year at this time? Seemed like the rain was never going to quit. And it didn't until nearly July.
This year, I've gone for long bike rides every weekend for the past month, my tomato plants are doing great, and I can keep the whole house cool in the evenings by having a box fan blow air out through one window, so the cool evening air gets sucked in through all the other windows. Sure, it's warm and a bit muggy, but daytime highs have stayed in the 80s, and it's hardly been high-summer DC mugginess. YMMV, but if every spring around here could be this nice, I'd say we'd be coming out way ahead.
Posted by: RT on May 15, 2004 05:22 AMtedb - apparently they are according to this in the NY Post:
I'm not going to waste a lot of my precious space on this, but the bottom line is that most of the 288,000 jobs that the Labor Department says were created last month may not really exist.
They could be figments of statisticians' optimism.
Anyone who plodded through my column last Thursday knows I predicted that job growth in April would be better than the 160,000 to 170,000 jobs that the "pros" were anticipating.
But I also said, quite emphatically I hope, that the stronger growth would be an illusion - the result of the Labor Department's computers making happy predictions about seasonal job creation that could neither be verified nor justified.
I'll explain one aspect.
Back in the March employment report, the government added 153,000 positions to its revised total of 337,000 new jobs because it thought (but couldn't prove) loads of new companies were being created in this economy.
That estimate comes from the Labor Department's "birth/death model." You can look up these numbers on the Department's Web site.
As staggering as the assumption about new companies was in March, the Labor Department got even more brazen in April.
Last Friday, it was disclosed that these imaginary jobs had been increased by 117,000 to 270,000 for the latest month - because, I guess, the stat jockeys got a vision from the gods of spring.
Without those extra 117,000 make-believe jobs, the total growth for April would have been just 171,000 - sub-par for an economy that's supposed to be growing at more than 4 percent a year, but right on the pros' targets.
Take away all 270,000 make-believe jobs and, well, you have the sort of pessimism that the political pollsters are seeing.
If I was the suspicious type (and if I thought Washington was smart enough), I'd suspect a nasty motive behind the sudden surge in these mystery jobs. But for now, let's just acknowledge their existence.
Also keep in mind that the government doesn't distinguish between good companies being created and, say, a guy doing consulting work out of his basement because he can't find real work.
What does this new job announcement mean in the real world?
Me, Thanks. Tedb
Posted by: tedb on May 15, 2004 07:52 AMFor those of us with flashbacks of youth, the skimpy spring outfits are nice too. A lot of the students don't bother to study for the tests that there are, anyway, so why give tests at all? Let them sunbathe.
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